The BACKFIRE Project

Welcome to BackFire.

This is a hastily thrown together web page to serve as an accumulation
point for specs, data, code, etc. for the project. Backfire is the working
name for a package to allow the backup (and restore!) of data files to a
DV-format (Digital Video) camcorder device via an IEEE 1394 link (aka FireWire or i.Link).

Why?

The rationale is as follows: a lot of folks (eg, me) have DV-capable
video camcorders, either mini-DV or Digital-8 (which records DV data on
an 8mm tape). These cameras are designed to transfer digital video data
to and from computers via a high-speed link. An hour of DV (Digital Video)
data (one tape's worth) is about 12 gigabytes, (less than that of real
data when you exclude format overhead). This makes it an ideal backup
medium for the larger size harddrives that are becoming available, at a
quite reasonable price (about $800 for a low-end mini-DV or D8 camcorder,
and another $80-$100 for a IEEE 1394/FireWire/i.Link card and cable)
compared to the multi-thousand-dollar commercial DAT/8mm/whatever based
SCSI tape backup systems that are currently the only feasible option.
(The low-priced consumer tape drives are too horrendously slow to make
regular backup of a 20 or 30 GB drive practical.)

What?

The core of the package will be a program that takes a regular data file
(a tar file, for example) and encapsulates it in the video frames of a DV
stream. (As far as the camcorder is concerned, it'd look like a video
of static, probably. The audio track is left clean to avoid any potential
damage to speaker systems, etc, if the tape is inadvertently played back in
an AV system.) Similarly it would strip the DV framing off such a stream
to restore it. (Appropriate interfaces for doing an actual backup or
restore of a file system would then be layered on top of this core.)

The intention is to release code under the GNU General Public License
and develop on and for the Linux OS (and any similar Unix OS using the
same 1394 API).

Who?

I'm Alastair JW Mayer, long-time programmer, part time hacker. See my
personal home page for more bio.

Several other folks have expressed interest and may be contributing, I'll
update this as appropriate.